Anti-aging skin care: Your new routine

Beauty

Anti-aging skin care: Your new routine

What most of us don’t even realize when establishing a skin care routine is that it needs to be three-fold: reversing past damage, maintaining a healthy complexion daily, and providing future protection. It’s exhausting, but anti-aging skin care mainly comes down to daily preventative care and vigilantly fighting against external and environmental damage. We consulted Mary Begovic Johnson, a principal scientist with Olay, for her expert anti-aging skin care secrets and the skin care routine to start right now for younger-looking skin. Anti-aging skin care prep: So, what’s the deal?

There are two causes of aging, friends: intrinsic, which is your natural biological aging (a.k.a. the kind you can’t control) and extrinsic or external lifestyle factors. “Our bodies our going to age, and a lot of that is tied into our skin energy,” Johnson explains. The batteries of our cells— mitochondria—produce energy for cellular renewal, which slows down over time. “We recognize now that older skin is tired skin, it’s fatigued, and so if you want it to renew itself faster and increase cell turnover, we need to actually help energize skin cells.”

The same goes for your body, which has less energy to keep your metabolism going with age. And that’s where lifestyle comes in: sun exposure, diet, smoking, air pollution—these are all accelerators of natural aging. “When you hit your 30s, 40s, 50s—each time you have to do a re-adjustment in the way that you eat and how much you exercise to keep your body in shape,” she says. “We’re doing that same thing now for skin.” Johnson recommends looking for anti-aging ingredients like peptides in your daily moisturizer. “Someone in their 50s is not going to look like someone in their 20s, no matter how great their lifestyle is,” she adds.

When you wake up, you may already have noticed the baggy eyes and that your skin perhaps doesn’t look as fresh in morning. “I think those are some of the first signs that women see in their 20s, and then it progresses,” says Johnson. Or the longer time it takes in front of the mirror in the morning to conceal evidence of a late night out. “That tired look, I think it’s the first thing women see.” Next comes is crepiness—wrinkling around the eyes—as well as a change in skin’s texture. “Your pores actually start increasing in size, starting in your teens and that actually continues for the rest of your life.”

And then there’s dryness. “Women in the 20s-and-30s range who never really seemed to need moisturizer before, all of a sudden are finding out— especially when the air is drier outside, or if they go from dry air conditioning inside to moisture outside—it just doesn’t recover as well.”

And what you start to see in your 30s is that when you make facial expressions—a smile or frown— those wrinkles start to persist. Johnson cites evidence from a 10-year study performed by Dr. Greg Hillebrand, a skin-aging expert and Procter & Gamble scientist, which revealed that the smile and expression lines eventually turn into your permanent wrinkles. The study also found that dry skin ages up to two times faster than hydrated skin. More proof to start using a moisturizer ASAP—if you aren’t already: “You’re going to make expressions and your skin rebounds so much faster when it’s well-moisturized.” A practical solution to staying in a runway perma-scowl to avoid wrinkles.

When should you start your anti-aging skin care routine? Read on to the next page to find out!

Anti-aging skin care prep: When to start (hint: ASAP!)

The good news with all this insight into the skin aging process? “It’s such a great time for younger women in skin care because we’ve learned so much about how to keep your skin healthy, how to keep it younger-looking for much longer,” says Johnson. “If you have the kind of lifestyle that’s going to accelerate aging, even if you’re in your 20s, you should be looking for a solution more for someone in their 30s.” Bad lifestyle and skin care habits—sun exposure, poor diets, smoking—can actually make the age of your skin much older than your biological age.

Adopt a daily commitment to moisturizing and cleansing—stat!—for proactive skin care to prevent further damage and to start the age-reversal process. “When you have acne, hyperpigmentation, things like that—you want to go ahead and exfoliate a little bit faster so that those kinds of marks disappear.” Look for ingredients that are good for acne-prone skin, like niacinamide, she says. Try Olay Fresh Effects Skin Perfecting Tinted Moisturizing Cream for daily moisturizing and SPF coverage.

You can probably guess the next and arguably most critical tool in anti-aging skin care: sunscreen, used daily. “Uneven skin tone caused by sun exposure can make skin to look up to 20 years older!” says Johnson. “When choosing your daily moisturizer, use a product with a broad spectrum SPF.” This goes for people with sensitive or problematic skin.

“I think a lot of people with acne-prone skin are a little afraid of sunscreen, and because of the heavy oils in it, they feel their face will breakout even further.” Try a beauty balm cream or lightweight tinted moisturizer with an SPF for all-in-one moisturizing and sun protection.

The real beauty about anti-aging skin care? It’s never too late to start.